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Dawn War
The Dawn War was an ancient prehistoric conflict in the Points of Light campaign setting between the gods and the primordials over the fate of the world. The gods won a narrow victory, but the consequences of the war still endures after centuries and millennia. Background During the beginning of the cosmos, the primordials of the Elemental Chaos created the mortal world from raw creation stuff and, as a side effect, its echoes the Feywild and the Shadowfell. The gods of the Astral Sea saw this creation, and added designs of their own that added a quality of permanence to the world, and gave rise to lifeforms, including intelligent ones. The primordials, antithetical to order and permanence, saw this as a marring of their work and grew antagonistic against the gods. The primordials planned to return the world to its raw materials and start a new work, as they had done before. The gods was against the destruction of the world they had put work into, and the annihilation of the mortal races that now served them. Thus both sides prepared for conflict. Beginning Tharizdun and the Obyriths Before the Dawn War, there existed a dying universe that had been brought to annihilation by a race of unparalleled evil, the obyriths. Seeking a way to escape to a new universe to conquer and destroy, they created a Shard of pure evil that they pushed through the boundary between universes to a new one. The Shard was found by the god Tharizdun, who had been seeking the cosmos for something that would give him the power to fight the primordials without the help of the other gods. When Tharizdun claimed the Shard, it linked his mind and spirit to the obyriths and drove him mad. Ignoring the obyriths attempts to manipulate him, he planted the Shard in the Elemental Chaos, an act that created the Abyss, birthplace of demons, and allowed the last of the obyriths to escape from their dying universe into the new one. For a long time the obyriths and Tharizdun fought each other for control over the Abyss, which ended in a stalemate that made both sides withdrew to plot each other's destruction. The Shard of Evil the obyriths created may have introduced evil into the universe, which earlier might have been a place of impartial order and chaos. Some regard Tharizduns act of creating the Abyss as the starting point of the Dawn War, whether it turned the primordials hostile to begin with or just provided the last drop in a growing hostility. The Lattice of Heaven The first major act of aggression during the beginning of the Dawn War occured when the pimordials invaded the Astral Sea and shattered the unfinished Lattice of Heaven, a creation that would have interlinked the different dominions of the Astral Sea into a single realm. The destruction of the Lattice caused irrevocable damage, and was seen by the gods as unforgivable. Changing Tactics At first, the gods were disorganized and couldn't gain an upper hand in the conflict. Then the war god Achra convinced several deites to team up with him during battles. Eventually, Achra battled the primordial Tabrach-Ti, the Queen of Bronze. After a long battle, Achra slew the Queen of Bronze, the first primordial to fall in the Dawn War. This convinced the gods to create a united front, to battle single primordials with teams of several gods, a turning point in the war. Achra gained the command over the bulk of the divine forces, and adopted a new name that the servants of the primordials had begun to call him; Bane. Battles Castanamir Castanamir was a brilliant general and tactician in the war, who allowed the elemental hordes to gain ground in the Astral Sea. Io, spurred into action, snatched up the primordial and flung him down into the natural world, where he moved no more. Castanamir, now known as the Shattered Khan, has been silent since then. The Far Realm Incursion In the deepest part of the Astral Sea existed the Living Gate, guarded by a guardian neither god nor primordial but kin to both. During the Dawn War, an unnamed god, in all likelihood Tharizdun, killed the guardian and opened the Living Gate, which allowed the creatures and defiling energy of the Far Realm to invade the Astral Sea. Many astral dominions were lost, and the gods had to turn away from the Dawn War to protect their realms. Ioun and Pelor put a stop to the incursion by shattering the Living Gate, at the cost of Pelors own astral dominion. The race of the shardminds arose from some types of fragments from the Living Gate, and some stories claim that mortals were first able to use psionic power during the original incursion. While destroying the Gate stopped the Far Realm incursion, without the Gate it has since then become more easy for the Far Realm to intrude into reality in other spots (since a sleeping Gate acted as defense). It can be inferred that the Far Realm incursion happened before Tharizdun was imprisoned by the other gods, since he opened the Living Gate, while it must have happened after he was turned mad by the Shard of Evil since that happened before the Dawn War broke out. It can also be inferred that Pelor did not make his home in the astral dominion of Hestavar before the loss of his own dominion at the shattering of the Living Gate. Io and Erek-Hus Io, the original god of dragons, chose to fight the primordials on his own with no help from the other gods, confident in his might. During the final phase of the Dawn War, he then encountered the primordial Erek-Hus, the King of Terror, alone. Some stories claim that Io was betrayed to the primordials by Zehir. Erek-Hus cleaved Io in two with his adamantine axe, and the halves became two new gods, Bahamut and Tiamat. Some legends claim that the race of the dragonborn arose from the spilled drops of Ios blood when he was killed. Together the two new gods killed Erek-Hus, but then turned on each other. Tiamat ultimately fled from the battle, and the two then joined the Dawn War, usually fighting alone. Ios death caused a rift between the planes; the guardian god Haramanthur sacrified himself to seal this rift. After Ios death, some dragons believed that the gods would lose the Dawn War. Rather than following Bahamut or Tiamat instead, they turned to the primordials for leadership, who in turn transformed these dragons into the first catastrophic dragons. Any event in the Dawn War that involved Bahamut or Tiamat could only have happened after the death of Io, which one source claim happened during the last years of the Dawn War (which could involve decades or centuries). Queen of Chaos After the imprisonment of Tharizdun, his chief lieutenant, the primordial Miska the Wolf-Spider, still tried to follow his orders to assault the Abyss to find the Shard of Evil, with the help of the Elemental Princes of Evil. He fought against the obyrith Obox-ob, then Prince of Demons, when the mightiest of the obyriths, the Queen of Chaos, slew Obox-ob and offered his title to Miska. Miska, already transforming from primordial into demon lord, gave her allegiance to her in exchange for her aid in destroying the gods of the Astral Sea. The Alliance between Miska and the Queen of Chaos began a climatic epoch of the Dawn War. The gods were losing when an exarch of Moradin and seven angels of Bahamut, the Wind Dukes of Aaqa, used the Soulforge of Moradin to craft the Rod of Law. The artifact turned the tide of war in the Astral Sea, and broke the will of the invaders when it was used to strike down Miska the Wolf-Spider. This banished the Prince of Demons to an unknown plane and shattered the Rod of Law into the artifact known as the Rod of Seven Parts. The Queen of Chaos, her power diminished and her will broken, dissipated back into the Abyss. The obyriths retreated into hiding at their Queens fall, and the demon lord Demogorgon chose that time to claim the title of Prince of Demons. After crushing his rivals and gathering their followers into a devastating force, Demogorgon repelled the forces of the Astral Sea from their assault on the Abyss. Final Years Balcoth Balcoth was a primordial who pursued the study of arcane magic and the boundaries of the mortal mind. The gods lured him out of hiding by creating a hardy-minded race that he could not corrupt in time for the gods to find him. Bane severed his head, and Moradin created a prison for it that Bahamut peopled with his followers to guard it. Balcoths body rampages mindlessly through the Elemental Chaos. It is probably since that time that Balcoth became known as the Groaning King. Mual-Tar Mual-Tar the Thunder Serpent was a primordial who sought to reclaim the skies and mountain peaks from the gods who had claimed them. Pelor and Moradin challenged Mual-Tar with the aid of Bahamut. The drove Mual-Tar back into the Elemental Chaos, where Moradin chained him. Nihil and Lakal One of Bahamuts battles was against the primordial Nihil, an incarnation of nothingness. The battled throughout the Astral Sea, until they crashed into Lakal, a god that was also at the same time her own dominion. Bahamut killed Nihil, but the primordials destruction made Lakal explode and die. Her people, the quom, until then a race of healers and mediators, vowed to restore her by assembling her fragments, no matter what the cost (some fragments became part of living creatures, and can only be extracted by killing them). The War of Winter In the final years of the Dawn War, Khala, goddess of winter, tried to become Queen of the Gods. Allied with Gruumsh, Kord, Tiamat, Zehir, and even some primordials, she casts a long wintry night over the world (with the help of Zehir). During a battle between Moradin and Kord, Kord came to regret the devestation he had caused during the battle, and chose to turn against Khala; soon after, he launced an assault against Gruumsh and crushed his former ally. Khala and her alliance are then defeated by Pelor, Kord, Moradin, Bane, and Asmodeus on the side of the opposing side. In exchange for power over winter, the Raven Queen banishes the defeated goddess into death. The War of Winter convinced the primal spirits of the world that the gods were as large a danger to the world as the primordials, and somehow enacted the primal ban, a powerful magic that made the world resist the intrusion of mightier elemental and astral beings like the gods and the primordials. Last Battle It is mentioned that in the final battle of the Dawn War, Kord slew the primordial Sehil barehanded. Aftermath By a margin, the gods were the winners of the Dawn War. Most primordials were either slain or imprisoned; some remain free, but in exile. The enactment of the primal ban by the primal spirits ensured that neither gods nor primordials could easily interfere directly in the world any longer. The gods, wearied by the long conflict, had no other choice but to accept that they had to influence the world indirectly from the Astral Sea. Chernoggar After being relieved of his duties as commander at the end of the Dawn War, Bane began to plot strategies of how to become leader of the gods again. Abandoning his own domain for strategic reasons, he assaulted the iron fortress of Tuer-Chern in the astral dominion of Chernoggar, and killed its master, the war god Tuern, to make the dominion his own. The rest of the pantheon united as a demonstration of strength against him, and Bane had to postpone his plans for domination. Then Gruumsh, eager to claim Tuer-Chern as his own, enacted a plan that crashed his own dominion of Nishrek into Chernoggar. Bane managed to prevent the dominions mutual destruction by fusing them together, but since then Bane have had to divide his attention to a constant war with Gruumsh. See also * The Dawn War Category:Points of Light